Barnes
and Wales
By
Mike Kroll
While comedian Stephen Colbert received most of the
attention and all of the media coverage he was but one of four to be awarded
honorary degrees by Knox College at Saturday's commencement. Shirley Barnes,
retired American ambassador to the Republic of Madagascar and president of the
Barnes Findley Foundation was awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree. Jimmy
Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, one of the most unique phenomena of the
Internet, was also awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree. And finally,
Diane Rosenberg, who stepped down after five years as chair of the Knox Board
of Trustees, was genuinely surprised as she was awarded an honorary doctor of
humane letters degree for her service to the college. Colbert was the only one
of the four to speak during the proceedings and he gave a fabulous speech, but
the significance of Barnes and Wales as honored guests should not be dismissed
lightly.
I interviewed both Barnes and Wales Friday night. Both
are bright and articulate and would have made fine speakers themselves. Of
these accomplished guests, one would be hard pressed to rank their importance
or impact on the world that students are now entering. Colbert is undoubtedly
the best known and most public, but Barnes may well be considered for a Nobel
Prize in the near future and Wales has introduced one of the most innovative
Internet technologies and gave that technology away!
Shirley Barnes
A former career diplomat, Barnes is spending much of
her time today in a frustrating battle against human trafficking, particularly
in southern Africa. Since 2003 she has focused on the estimated 800,000 to
900,000 people who are trafficked annually, mostly from poor countries in
Africa, Asia or South America to wealthier nations such as those in the
European Union and even the U.S. ÒThe majority are young and female and they
are commonly traded for sexual exploitation or child labor,Ó explained Barnes.
ÒThe chronic conditions of poverty, social and civil unrest and the traditional
cultural preference for male children combine to make teenage girls the most
commonly trafficked human commodity today.Ó
It is hard to see any clear distinction between what
is now called Òhuman traffickingÓ and the institution of slavery that tore
America apart during the nineteenth century. Commerce in human beings is almost
universally condemned worldwide, and some countries officially consider the
activity a crime against humanity, yet Barnes says it remains a profitable and
growing form of international trade, an underground economy seldom
acknowledged. ÒWhen you have a clandestine trade operation with worldwide
involvement it is really hard to accurately count the number of victims, but I
am convinced most of these numbers are woefully low. There may be as many as
50,000 annually trafficked to the United States alone!Ó
Barnes sees her role in this fight as a balance
between generating popular awareness of the problem and soliciting political
involvement by the world's nations in combating the traffickers. ÒMost people
are amazed to learn that few nations had laws specifically barring human
trafficking until the last four or five years. Until recently traffickers
themselves faced few legal repercussions while their victims were often treated
as criminals and illegal immigrants.Ó
The Barnes Findley Foundation places a special
emphasis on strategies to control the trafficking in African young women and
children. ÒI first became truly aware of the scope of this problem while
serving in Rome. An Italian diplomat approached me concerned over the huge
number of African girls brought into Italy for sexual exploitation. Trafficking
in humans is inhuman no matter where it occurs, but most of the attention has
been focused on eastern Europe or southeast Asia while the plight of young
African women seemed to garner little note.Ó
The human trafficking industry places an enormous
value upon youth, and many of those traded are young women who are not only
used in prostitution, pornography (particularly child porn), and unpaid
domestic help; but also as mail-order brides and even nannies. ÒIn many cases
their value is as fleeting as their youth, and these victims are victimized yet
again when they are frequently abandoned as young adults.Ó
And the secondary victims of human trafficking include
all of us. ÒWhen you consider the social and economic conditions under which
human trafficking prospers you can see that it is a ripe conduit for the spread
of HIV aids and other diseases that are prevalent among the population being trafficked.
It is a commonly held fiction the world over that the young are not infected or
disease-free, and even less true as their exposure to the sex trade advances.
The world community needs to unite in open opposition to this inhuman activity
and traffickers must be subject to harsh prosecution for their crimes.Ó
Jimmy Wales
ÒObviously the administrators of this college didn't
research my grades before offering me this honorary degree,Ó joked Wales. ÒThis
is a new experience for me and I am quite honored but surprised. Young people
like these graduates are a big part of what makes Wikipedia the success it is.
These students will be at the forefront of extending the Wiki concept into more
and more areas.Ó
Wikipedia is currently the largest encyclopedia available
on the Internet with over 3.8 million articles covering the gamut of topics and
compiled from publicly contributed entries than can be edited by any user. It
is available in dozens of languages, but English claims the largest number of
entries at over 1.177 million and growing. The encyclopedia is but one example
of the Wiki concept in use. It has been joined by a Wiktionary, Wikibooks,
Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikispecies, etc. Wales didn't invent the Wiki, but his
work has helped create the Wiki phenomenon.
ÒThe original concept was to create a freely
accessible media for the transmission of all the world's knowledge that was
built by the contributions and editing of its user community. My first idea for
an Internet encyclopedia, Nupedia, began in 2001, but we worked so hard at
building in all the editorial controls to ensure that only qualified people
made contributions that we doomed the project. The key to Wikipedia's success
is that it is almost completely open and governed, regulated if you will, by
the user community itself.Ó
Wales created a non profit Wikimedia Foundation to
operate Wikipedia and its non-profit offshoots. Despite its tremendous growth
he reports that there are only four paid employees of the foundation, and that
does not include himself because he is unpaid. The vast majority of the work is
done by a large group of dedicated volunteers, and the entire endeavor is
supported solely by contributions. The Wikimedia Foundation does not accept
advertising, and Wales got it started with his own money earned as a very
successful options trader on the Chicago Board of Trade. It cost roughly one
million dollars to operate the Wikimedia Foundation in 2005, with constantly
increasing costs of hardware and bandwidth accounting for most of the cost.
With the slogan, Òthe free encyclopedia anyone can
edit,Ó Wikipedia was guaranteed to have detractors — notably the
publishers of the old-line traditional encyclopedias and academics. Wales is a
true adherent to the concept of publicly open free software like the many
distributions of Linux and the increasingly popular Mozilla Firefox browser or
OpenOffice. Wikipedia was merely the application of this model to a new task,
according to Wales. ÒI'm a programmer at heart; admittedly a bad one but more
or less a geek. I have totally adopted the GNU concept of free software, and
everything we use or develop for Wikimedia is GNU licensed and freely available
to anyone. I am proud of the fact that for most of our new users Wikipedia is
their introduction to the GNU free software concept.Ó
Wikipedia's critics challenge the accuracy and quality
of its content because anyone can contribute or edit any subject without any
formal vetting or peer review. There is even a website dedicated to denouncing
the misguided influence of Wikipedia (www.wikipedia-watch.org)
maintained by one of Wales' most strident critics, Daniel Brandt. These critics
fear that the very openness of Wikipedia permits users to add inaccurate
information, either through innocent ignorance or with malicious intent. Wales
acknowledges that bad information can get into Wikipedia but counters that the
open community concept is self-correcting.
ÒOne of the great things about Wikipedia is that there
is no single author of any article. Anybody can post additions or changes at
any time and that is why it has seen such phenomenally quick growth but also
why misinformation is unlikely to persist for long. This is built by consensus, and the large
number and wide base of contributors will result in a neutral stance on most
issues and quick attention to most inaccuracies. There is no disputing that
vandalism can and does occur, but I believe we maintain a high standard for
editing content. As a virtually real-time reference source we are constantly
expanding and updating entries. There is no timelier reference source available
anywhere.Ó
Perhaps this real-time, constantly in flux nature of
Wikipedia is one of its reasons for success in attracting Internet users. It is
constantly ranked as one of the highest traffic sites on the web. ÒDuring the
three-month period between December 1st and the end of February we almost
tripled the amount of daily traffic to Wikipedia and there is no sign that such
growth will slow down in the near future.Ó Unlike traditional reference sites,
Wikipedia is constantly changing, and one of the givens on the Internet is that
frequently updated content is key to attracting traffic. Also a strength of
Wikipedia is that because it is driven by the knowledge and interests of its
users the style and content of articles is anything but consistent. For
instance, pick any two or three major cities, compare their Wikipedia entries,
and take note of how differently each such entry is approached by its authors. However,
the inverse is also true — lack of interest on some subjects restricts
how comprehensive Wikipedia can be.
Wales remains a capitalist at heart and has recently
launched a related but independent for–profit venture called Wikia.com
that applies the Wiki concept to content that will feature advertising. ÒThis
new project still offers open access but has a much broader usage base. People
can create their own Wikia community and we will host it for free. This is an
opportunity for a Wiki approach to a personal website, and I am hoping that it
might provoke the rebirth of true participatory politics during an election
year like this. This is yet another demonstration of the unlimited utility of
the Wiki concept, and I actually encourage competitors to use our technology.Ó
06/08/06